Then We Were Children

Every Advent I read W.H. Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. I have been doing this for many years. Last Christmas my eldest son gave me a new annotated edition of the book with an introduction and notes by Alan Jacobs. I have started my seasonal reading of the poem a bit early this year because Advent is so short, beginning three days after Thanksgiving and lasting only three and a half weeks. 

The sixty-five-page dramatic poem begins with an assessment of the earthly and spiritual condition at the time of Jesus’ birth, as well as the time the poem was birthed, which was during the Second World War. The opening sentence sets the tone: 

Darkness and snow descend; 

The clock on the mantelpiece 

Has nothing to recommend, 

Nor does the face in the glass 

Appear nobler than our own 

As darkness and snow descend 

On all personality. 

The dark snow represents a time when “The prophets lantern is out / And gone the boundary stone.” He contrasts it with ordinary times of alternating good and bad, which he calls “our familiar tribulations.”  

These after all are our familiar tribulations, 

So that, taking the bad with the good, the pattern composed 

by the ten thousand odd things that can possibly happen 

is permanent in a general average way.... 

That is why we were always able to say: ‘We are children of God. 

And our Father has never forsaken his people.’ 

 

But something different was happening in Mary of Nazareth’s day and in Auden’s day. I suspect it may be happening in our day as well. Things feel very different now. He writes: 

 

But then we were children: That was a moment ago, 

Before an outrageous novelty had been introduced  

Into our lives. Why were we never warned? perhaps we were.  

Perhaps that mysterious noise at the back of the brain  

We noticed on certain occasions - sitting alone  

In the waiting room of the country junction, looking  

Up at the toilet window - was not indigestion  

But this Horror starting already to scratch Its way in?  

Just how, just when It succeeded we shall never know:  

We can only say that now It is there and that nothing  

We learnt before It was there is now of the slightest use,  

For nothing like It has happened before. It is as if  

We had left our house for five minutes to mail a letter,  

And during that time the living room had changed places 

With the room behind the mirror over the fireplace....  

 

It feels as if we are on the verge of such a time in our country, and perhaps in the world. We are no longer children. As Auden’s older contemporary William Butler Yeats wrote shortly after the First World War in “The Second Coming”: 

 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst 

Are full of passionate intensity. 

 

I doubt we are approaching the Second Coming during this season when we celebrate the First Coming. At least I do not expect a Second Coming in the literal sense that fundamentalists expect, though perhaps in a metaphorical and spiritual sense. But in our time – like Auden’s - something different is happening. The center is not holding. Things are falling apart. Who knows what that means for the future? Therefore this Advent season is the time to prepare ourselves.